POWER COOP GM BUCKS INCLUSION IN ROTATIONAL BROWNOUT
BACOLOD CITY-- The general manager of the local electric cooperative expressed dismay over the inclusion of Bacolod City and neighboring areas in the rotating brownouts or technically called "manual load dropping " imposed by the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP). Sulpicio Lagarde, general manager of the Central Negros Electric Cooperative (CENECO) told Negros Daily Bulletin yesterday that last Friday he was surprised when he was informed by NGCP that they had allocated only 3.9 megawatts to the power firm. "If NGCP can arbitrarily decide on who goes out and who does not, what is now the relevance of us contracting to a specific plant?, I can accept their reason if the plants where we have contracts are the one's not running," Lagarde said. CENECO has a power contract agreements with Palm Concepcion in Iloilo, KEPCO- SALCON in Toledo City, Cebu, Energreen in Bago City, Negros Occidental and the Palimpinon Geothermal Power Plant in Valencia, Negros Oriental. "They are all running," Lagarde said. On Friday last week imposed a manual load dropping in all Visayas electric cooperatives citing "supply deficiency caused by the outage of power plants located in Leyte." He said that NGCP decided "on its own to divide the available power depending on the size of the distributors." "We have reserved power to cover our power supply needs in case there is a deficiency in the grid," he pointed out. We will demand a refund from them, he said, He added that NGCP also told him that there was "market intervention last week." This means that Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) "can be shutdown or suspended and the systems operator takes over in this case NGCP, Lagarde said. "They should respect the sanctity of the contracts we signed with the other power plants," he said.